By Clifford Agugoesi, Editor-in-Chief

He needs little or no introduction.  Professor Hyacinth Sama Nwana is the Chief Executive Officer and founding member of Atlantic Telecoms and Media.

As a senior Executive and ex-Regulator and multiple award-winning Technologist and Thought Leader, Prof Nwana mentors and advises Business Corporations such as Microsoft and Venture Capital firms, Governments and Regulators in TMT. 

In case you have forgotten, he has written many books including but not limited to Telecommunications, Media & Technology(TMT) For Developing Countries , How To Make TMT Improve Developing Economies In Africa and Elsewhere For The 2020s.

Now, the prolific author has come up with another book: The Internet Value Chain and The Digital Economy: Insight and Guidance on Digital Economy Policy and Regulation.

Digitalising economies has consequences: ranging from Big Tech competition risks, cybercrime, harmful online content, fake news and disinformation, to social media amplification algorithms, and much more.

The digital economy is increasingly a part of our world, presenting new challenges for regulators and policy-makers.

This book explores, in-depth, the key policy considerations for the digital economy and offers recommendations on potential solutions for policy makers and regulators to help develop a balanced, efficient, and coordinated approach in regulating a complex environment.

Beginning with an introduction to the Internet Value Chain (IVC) and its economic impacts, the author provides structure and characterisation of the positive and negative externalities, the latter in terms of their risks and harms, considering how these need to be controlled or regulated.

The regulatory principles and best practices we need to consider in the digital economy are defined using a combination of the current offline telecoms, media & technology challenges and new Big Tech risks and harms, along with the numerous online issues arising from the IVC.

The supplementary section of this volume identifies many thematic challenging areas of the digital economy problem statement, defines them more granularly and makes some brief recommendations on what, where and how digital economy policy-makers can start addressing them.

The challenging new Digital Economy areas covered in depth include:

·        Offline TMT/ICT

·        Digital Economy Platforms

·        Future of Content, Broadcasting and Media Regulation

·        Online Content Harms

·        Big Tech Regulation

·        Cybercrime

·        Cybersecurity

·        AI and Big Data

·        Privacy

·        Data Protection

·        Electronic Commerce

·        Over-The-Top (OTT) Regulation

·        Digital Economy Capacity Building

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in internet regulation or digital economy policy. In addition, it will be helpful for those involved in designing policies, regulations, research programmes or strategies related to these subjects.